Arcane Topics in Economics and Philosophy, Interspersed with Various Distractions

February 10, 2008

America's Heroic Age

It's been a long time since I've read a book that affected me as much as Lonesome Dove, the 1985 cowboy saga by Larry McMurtry. To try to convey it, I'll borrow from Alasdair MacIntyre, who writes a little about "heroic ages" in After Virtue:

In all those cultures, Greek, medieval or Renaissance, where moral thinking and action is structured according to some version of the scheme that I have called classical, the chief means of moral education is the telling of stories. Where Christianity or Judaism or Islam have prevailed, biblical stories are as important as any other; and each culture of course has stories that are peculiarly its own; but every one of these cultures, Greek or Christian, also possesses a stock of stories which derive from and tell about its own vanished heroic age. In sixth-century Athens the formal recitation of the Homeric poemswas established as a public ceremony; the poems themselves were substantially composed no later than the seventh-century, but they speak of a very much earlier time even than that. In thirteenth-century Christian Iceland men wrote sagas about the events of the hundred years after A.D. 930, the period immediately before and immediately after the first coming of Christianity, when the old religion of the Norsemen still flourished. In the twelfth century in the monastery of Clonmacnoise Irish monks wrote down in the Lebor na hUidre stories of Ulster heroes, some of whose language enables scholars to date them back to the eighth century, but whose plots are situated centuries before that in an era when Ireland was still pagan... Such narratives provided the historical memory... of the societies in which they were finally written down. More than that they provided a moral background to contemporary debate in classical societies, an account of a now-transcended or partly-transcended moral order whose beliefs and concepts were still partially influential, but which also provided an illuminating contrast to the present. The understand of heroic society -- whether it ever existed or not -- is thus a necessary part of the understanding of classical society and of its successors. (After Virtue, 121)

What hit me as I was reading Lonesome Dove is that America's Wild West is the equivalent of Iceland's tenth century, of the Ireland of Cuchulainn, of the Homeric age in Greece and Troy. The cowboy remains a romantic figure, the symbol of an ethos, the symbol of America to some. Fifty years ago the Western was a popular film genre; nowadays it seems to have gone out of fashion, partly because Hollywood is dominated by a liberal value system that rejects the cowboy ethos, though that ethos still has a constituency in the heartland. When I was a kid, the cartoon "Pecos Bill" was a family favorite. Narrated by Robin Williams, it is a hilarious retelling of the old Western tall tale about a man who was raised by a wolf and grew up to be a Herculean cowboy who ended up lassoing a tornado (the two wrestled and dug the Grand Canyon). Though Robin Williams pulls it off, it's hard to bring the old myths to life. The Greeks could still half-believe in their gods and heroes, but America is too Christian and too scientific to regard a Pecos Bill or a Paul Bunyan as anything but a joke-- even if myth is sometimes the garment of truth.

Lonesome Dove at once demystifies the Old West and brings the myth to life.

McMurtry's description of a small Texas town, of Dodge City, of a cattle
drive, of fights with Indians, of outlaws, of the Great Plains in the
wake of the slaughter of the buffalo, capture the history of the time.
I'm not enough of a historian to say how accurate it is, but McMurtry
conveys certain social realities. Illiteracy, for example: once or
twice he slips into the head of a character who can't read. The
brutality of Comanche raids and kidnappings. The novel is full of
murders and rapes. A prairie housewife who has to order reading
material from the East Coast and England and wait weeks for it to
come. Frontier towns where most of the female population are whores.
Child mortality. The sex imbalance: most of the characters are male.
The boredom and loneliness, and the endless card-playing and gambling
and whiskey-drinking that ward it off. There are at least a dozen
murders and rapes, and you get the sense that that was just part of
life then, in a way it isn't now. McMurtry handles much of this with a
humor that makes you accept it, half-forgetting how sad it is; even
murders and rapes are passed over without indignation. (Remember that The Iliad
begins with Achilles' anger when a slave woman given to him as spoils
of war is taken away; rape is taken for granted by the Homeric Greeks
as by the Comanches and Kiowas in Lonesome Dove.) And it's
against this backdrop that the novel's heroes-- especially the two
indomitable Texas rangers W.F. Call and Gus McCrae-- stand tall.

I'll borrow from MacIntyre again:

M.I. Finley has written of Homeric society: "The basic values of
society were given, predetermined and so were a man's place in the
society and the privileges and duties that followed from his status."
What Finley says of Homeric society is equally true of other forms of
heroic society in Iceland or in Ireland... In such a society a man
knows who he is by knowing his role in these structures; and in knowing
this he knows what he owes and what is owed to him... There is also a
clear understanding of what actions are required to perform these and
what actions fall short of what is required. For what is required are
actions. A man in heroic society is what he does. (After Virtue, 122)

In the early chapters of Lonesome Dove, the point of the
novel seems to be to get some laughs at the characters' expense, as
they drink and gamble and moon over the local whore(W.F. Call stays aloof) in the desolate, sleepy border town of Lonesome Dove. It's startling to discover, as their great adventure gets going, that they are heroes. That
is, that it is men like W.F. Call and Gus McCrae that inspired in their
fellow men the feelings that gave that word its connotations; and the
virtues that can only be displayed in the midst of dangerous
adventures, were there, latent, even in their low-minded idling in
Lonesome Dove. Let virtue here be understood not in the
civilized sense, certainly not in the Christian sense, but in a more
primitive sense characteristic of heroic ages. "What epic and saga
then portray is a society which already embodies the form of the epic
or saga." To the characters in Lonesome Dove, the system of
values is already in place, they understand it and judge one another by
it; it is the reader who must learn them, and who is often startled by
them, startled by a sense of admiration, thinking, So these were the kind of men who conquered the West...

Cowboy skills-- riding a bucking bronco, throwing a lariot-- are a minor branch of showbiz today, the stuff of rodeos. There's something fascinating about the very phoniness
of the rodeo, as of the medieval tournament: the faux cowboys who ride
the bucking broncos and rope steers in the arena, to cheering crowds,
are mimicking what was once an important economic function, but
isn't today. Why? Why is that fun, either for the riders or for the
crowds? Yet there was a time long ago, when a continent waited to be
won by those skills. Like the battle for Troy, that time didn't last
very long. The memory seems out of proportion to the event.

For all the functionalism of the heroic virtues, the great
enterprises in which these virtues are exercised may seem inadequately
motivated, or even destructive. A theme of the novel is human motivation:
what does a man live for? For most of the characters, it's no big
mystery: the cowhands and the whores, for example, are mostly just
trying to earn a living. But why does W.F. Call, "the most respected
man on the border," with money in the bank from years of running a
livery stable, decide to round up 3,000 head of stolen Mexican cattle
and drive it north into Montana, after a chance word from Jake Spoon,
an old rangering comrade returned after years of rambling, that it's
"good country," a "cattleman's paradise," but still full of dangerous
Indians? Why does Gus, equally famous and well-off, and dubious about
the adventure from the beginning, go along with it? Why does Josh
Deats, the expert black tracker, remain loyal to Call's leadership
despite his forebodings about the north? And why, fifteen years
earlier, did Clara Allen, the beautiful and clever girl whom Gus wanted
to marry, and who loved him, instead marry a mediocrity and move to
Nebraska to trade horses? They make history-- they become the first
outfit to lead a Texas herd north of the Yellowstone, they start the
first ranch in Montana-- but why? For kudos, glory? For the
progress of civilization? For adventure, to use their skills, to "be
all that they can be," to borrow the army recruiter's slogan? Yes,
yes, and yes, and yet if it ends in regrets it yet seems inevitable in
retrospect. It was in these men to live for adventure; they could not
be different.

There is an interesting parallel, in fact, between the beginnings of Lonesome Dove and the Iliad:
both are started by a womanizer. (There are some interesting parallels
between Paris, whose seduction of Helen triggers the Trojan War, and
Jake Spoon.)

MacIntyre writes:

Death in Homer is an unmixed evil... To be a suppliant, to be a
slave, to be slain on the battlefield is to have been defeated; and
defeat is the moral horizon of the Homeric hero, that beyond which
nothing is to be seen, nothing lies. But defeat is not the Homeric
poet's moral horizon, and it is precisely by reason of this difference
that the Homer of the Iliad transcends the limitations of the
society which he portrays... What the poet of the Iliad sees and his
characters do not is that winning too may be a form of losing... the
complementary truth to that of the Iliad is that losing may on occasion
be a form of winning. (After Virtue, 127-8)

Death in Lonesome Dove, and there is a lot of it, has this
character: an unmixed evil. Gus likes to read the Biblical prophets
because "he regarded himself as a prophet" and liked to read "his
predecessors," but there is scant indication that the characters hope
for heaven or think much about it. No character in the novel dies for
a higher cause. Dostoyevksy and Tolstoy are infused with Christianity
and certain deaths-- that of Father Zosima in particular-- are even an
occasion for joy. In Lonesome Dove, the death watches and the scenes of burial are comparatively unsentimental, yet somehow all the more poignant.

Also poignant is the contrast between the Old West of Lonesome Dove, and what that empty continent has now become, and was already destined to become then. MacIntyre writes:

Heroic societies, as they are represented by the Homeric poems or
the Icelandic or Irish sagas may or may not have existed; but the
belief that they had existed was crucial to those classical and
Christian societies which understood themselves as having emerged frfom
the conflicts of heroic society and which defined their own standpoint
partially in terms of that emergence. No fifth-century Athenian could
behave just as Agamemnon or Achilles behaved. No thirteenth-century
Icelander could have behaved quite like the men of the tenth century.
The monks at Clonmacnoise were very different from Conchobor or
Cuchulainn. Yet the heroic literature provided a central part of fthe
moral scriptures of those later societies; and it is from the
difficulties involved in relating those scriptures to actual practice
that many of the key moral characteristics of the later societies
arise. (After Virtue, 131)

Exactly! The this is America feeling is part of what makes Lonesome Dove
so compelling. Cowboys and gunslingers and saloons and poker and
horses and rattlesnakes and lariots and cattle drives and rangers and
sheriffs and Dodge City and pistoleros and Comanche raids and
the grave on the lone prairie and a Texas bull confronting a grizzly
bear-- it's at once so familiar, even cliche, and so remote.
As an American, you want to measure yourself by that standard, and yet
no one today can behave like Gus McCrae or W.F. Call or Jake Spoon.
One cannot be a hero in that mold, now. That is the power and the
mystery of Lonesome Dove. One has the feeling that somehow
these rough, dirty, blunt, unlettered, not-too-moral men, yet at the
same time with their courage and pride and enterprise, live on in us
still; that our national character has been shaped by them, that the
virtues they lived by, transformed to be sure, still somehow define us
in ways we are not conscious of, and are part of America's greatness.
At the same time, they are part of a world that is dead, that is lost
forever, even though, whatever reason and conscience may say about it,
one can't wholly silence the urge to wish it back.

What are we to make of it, of heroic ages and heroic virtues? A
sadness and a fatalism hangs over the whole of the heroic way of life,
for "death is the moral horizon" of the hero, an unmixed evil, and yet
it is that for which we are all destined. What use is it to admire, to
thrill at, the indomitable will of W.F. Call or the wit and wisdom and
courage of a Gus McCrae, when it can only end in defeat? Yet it is
with borrowed heroic language-- "the Lord of Hosts"-- that the Bible
teaches us of the glory of God, and the Christians proclaim that in
Christ "we are more than conquerors." Christ, though he refused
earthly power, yet let himself be called "king." Mortal glory, echoing
through history with its thrills and regrets, lends to our vocabularies
and our imaginations the intimations of immortal glory.

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